War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [798]
10. with a monogram: Gowns embroidered with the monograms of the tsaritsa were worn by the ladies-in-waiting of the imperial court.
11. plan for eternal peace: Tolstoy’s abbé Morio is based on the Italian abbé Scipio Piatolli, sometime tutor to Prince A. A. Czartoryski. The prince became a councillor to the young Alexander I and in 1804–1806 served as minister of foreign affairs, giving Piatolli access to the highest circles in Petersburg, where he presented his plan for eternal peace by means of a European union against Napoleon.
12. the duc d’Enghien: See note 4.
13. Kutuzov…appointed commander in chief: In 1802 Kutuzov was dismissed from his post as military governor of Petersburg, but in the summer of 1805 he was made commander in chief of the 50,000-man Russian army that was sent to Austria for the war with Napoleon.
14. sacre de Milan: In 1805 Napoleon proclaimed himself king of Italy and was crowned in Milan on 28 May.
15. Louis XVI…la reine…madame Elisabeth: Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were condemned to death by the Convention and beheaded in 1793, Elisabeth de France, the sister of Louis XVI, in 1794.
16. the Condés: The family of Condé was a collateral branch of the French royal house of Bourbon; many of its members played an important part in the history of France (see also note 4).
17. Contrat social: Rousseau’s theoretical work, Du Contrat social (“Of the Social Contract”), published in 1762, caused a considerable stir and helped to inspire the French revolution. Its central idea is that social life is based on a contract in which each party resigns his freedom to the community and agrees to submit to the expression of the general will.
18. the eighteenth Brumaire: On 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire of the year VIII according to the French republican calendar), Napoleon, having returned from Egypt, overthrew the Directoire in a bloodless coup d’état and instituted the Consulat, consolidating all power in his own hands as first consul.
19. the prisoners…in Africa: Four thousand Turkish soldiers, who had surrendered to Napoleon at the siege of the Palestinian port city of Jaffa in 1799 on condition that their lives would be spared, were shot on his orders, supposedly in punishment for the killing of a French peace envoy.
20. the bridge of Arcole…plague victims: On 17 November 1796, fighting the Austrians in northern Italy, Napoleon, at the head of his grenadiers and with a banner in his hand, charged onto the bridge at Arcole to keep the enemy from taking it. The plague that was raging in Jaffa (see previous note) when the French stormed the city afflicted both the local population and the French army. Napoleon visited the plague victims in the hospital with his marshals Berthier and Bessières, an incident commemorated by the French painter Jean-Antoine Gros (1771–1835) in The Plague Victims of Jaffa (1804).
21. Commentaries: That is, De Bello Gallico (“The Gallic Wars,” ca. 50 b.c.), a year-by-year account of the Roman conquest of Gaul by the general and statesman Julius Caesar (100–44 b.c.), who carried out the conquest.
22. a Mason: A member of the fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons, derived ultimately from the medieval guild of stonemasons. In London in 1717 four of its “lodges” formed themselves into a “grand lodge” with a new constitution, a special ritual, and a system of secret signs, and from London it spread to many countries of the world. Masonry was (and is) a society of mutual aid and brotherhood, but in the eighteenth century it acquired political dimensions and was of some significance in the beginnings of the French revolution. Masonry was alternately embraced and banned in a number of countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pierre’s connections with Masonry will play a considerable part in what follows.
23. Break